Sherrod Brown: “one of the joys of this job, serving as one of 435 Members of this body that we call the House of Representatives, is…”

“one of the joys of this job, serving as one of 435 Members of this body that we call the House of Representatives, is that we are at an interesting time in our history. We are clearly the wealthiest Nation on Earth, the most powerful militarily. We clearly are a country that has the most opportunity to do good in the world. One of the ways we do that is using our economic prowess in trade agreements; we could do this, to lift up standards around the world. Mr. Speaker, that means when we trade with Mexico, for instance, and I think we should trade with Mexico and do a lot of trading with Mexico, rather than pulling our truck safety standards down to Mexico's level or pulling our food safety standards down to Mexico's level, or pulling our safe drinking water and clean air and anti-pollution standards down to Mexico's level, that we can instead pull their standards up. We have the ability to do that. We can write trade agreements that say when an American company invests in Mexico, they have to dispose of their waste in the same way there that the Environmental Protection Agency makes them do in this country.”